Starpilot's Grave: Book Two of Mageworlds

by Doyle, Debra; Macdonald, James D.

Wasteful, thought sus-Airaalin—who had his own reasons for finding the children. The threads they wove into the fabric of the universe were strong ones, such as could make the pattern whole, or destroy it utterly.

  But again Errec Ransome was shaking his head. “I’m sorry. I can’t tell you.”

  Not “I don’t know,” sus-Airaalin noted. But “I can’t tell you.”

  He knows.

  As usual, dinner at the asteroid base was a formal affair, a matter of cut-glass goblets and spotless napery, of milk-white porcelain dishes and tall scented candles.

  Nyls Jessan and Ignaceu LeSoit sat on either side of the glittering table. In deference to the setting, Jessan had dressed for dinner in the suit of Khesatan formal wear that the robots had provided. LeSoit, on the other hand, had apparently puzzled the robots at first; Jessan doubted that the devices had anything in their memories covering fancy dress on Suivi Point. In the end, the robots had compromised on ordinary free-spacer’s garments, tailored from white spidersilk and black broadcloth instead of cheap synthetics.

  Beka was nowhere in sight, and her chair at the head of the table was empty. The robots offered no explanation. Jessan tried not to keep watching the door, and tried not to worry.

  He fiddled absentmindedly with the silverware as the robots began wheeling out a selection of dishes in electrum-plated warming trays: baked crallach meat in bram-bleberry sauce; pickled faan-fruit; spiced water-grain frumenty. He let the robots serve him with helpings of all of the dishes, then poked at the food idly with the tines of his fork.

  Across the table from him, LeSoit methodically pulled a dinner roll apart into small pieces, then left the fragments in a heap on his plate.

  “The food’s all right,” LeSoit said after some time—though Jessan had yet to see him taste any of the dishes the robots had presented. “Where does it all come from?”

  Jessan shrugged. “I don’t know. Synthesizers, some of it, I think. For the rest, your guess is as good as mine.”

  LeSoit didn’t answer. A robot came and took the torn dinner rolls away, replacing them with a clean plate; LeSoit picked up another roll and started all over again.

  After a while the gunman said, “How long do you think we’re going to be cooped up here?”

  “Until the repairs are done, at least,” said Jessan without looking at LeSoit—he was watching the door again instead. The door remained obstinately shut. “Probably until the hi-comms come back up, and we can get some idea of what’s going on out there.”

  “You think the comms are going to come back?”

  “What?—oh.” Jessan forced his attention away from the door. “I’d say so, yes. Bringing them down was a Mageworlds trick in the first place, and their fleet will need to talk with their own people back home before much longer.”

  Another robot glided up to the table, this time to pour wine into the goblets. Jessan sipped at the liquid without tasting it and set the goblet back on the table. LeSoit asked him another question; when Jessan realized that he hadn’t heard either the question or the answer that he gave to it, he pushed back his chair and stood up.

  “That does it,” he said. He crumpled his napkin and threw it down onto the tablecloth. “Go ahead and finish without me. I’ll be back after I find the captain.”

  It took him almost an hour of searching to find her, and then it was in the most obvious of places, the one he had left until last because he hadn’t thought she would be there. But when the rest of the base’s upper reaches proved empty, he went at last to Beka’s room—the bare chamber far down an unused corridor that had once been the asteroid’s observation deck.

  He set his palm against the lockplate, and the door slid open. Inside, the lights were off and the ceiling panels were down, leaving nothing but armor-glass for a barrier between the room and the stars.

  Beka was standing alone in the center of the room. Her back was to the door, and she was looking up at the starfield spread out overhead.

  She didn’t turn around as Jessan entered. Something about her posture made him feel colder at the bone—some indefinable quality at once familiar and totally alien—so that he was shaken by fear for her. He crossed the room in three quick strides, the velvety floor covering yielding under his feet with each step, then made himself stop an arm’s length away.

  “Beka?” he said quietly. “Are you well?”

  She turned around. “Nyls?”

  “Yes.”

  He had to fight to keep his composure. No trace of the usual go-to-hell arrogance remained on her features—her face was so pale that the starlight made it look like bone, and her eyes were wide and dark, as if she’d been contemplating something she feared more than death itself.

  And the captain doesn’t fear hell, death, or damnation … .

  He reached out a hand toward her and called her by the nickname he’d learned from her brother Ari. “Bee?”

  She caught at his hand with desperate strength and pulled him to her. This close, he could feel the tremors that ran through her body, one after the other. She pressed her face down hard against his shoulder, and he held her without saying anything until the shaking stopped.

  “There,” he said finally—knowing it sounded inane, but not knowing anything better to say, either. “There … are you feeling better now, Captain?”

  She pulled back a little and looked up at him. He saw with relief that the frozen terror was gone from her face. She was still pale and intent, but she no longer looked like a stranger in her own body.

  “Nyls,” she said, “do you love me?”

  He blinked, startled. “Yes. I thought you knew.”

  “Then stay with me, Nyls; I need you.”

  “Of course. Always.”

  She seemed to relax a bit more, as though her worst fear had receded a little further. But her face was still worried.

  “Then you’ll come with me to Suivi Point?” she asked.

  “To Suivi, or anywhere,” he said, puzzled. “But what is there for us at Suivi Point?”

  “For us? Nothing … but there’s something I have to go there and do. Promise you’ll back me, no matter what happens?”

  “No matter what happens,” he said. “When do we leave?”

  “Tomorrow,” she said, and now her voice had the familiar snap of command. “Because I have to be ready at Suivi when the hi-comms come back up.”

  VI.

  NAMMERIN: NAMPORT THE OUTER NET

  “SOMETHING is wrong here, Klea. Something is very wrong.”

  Klea Santreny stared at Owen across the table in the all-night noodle shop. His words seemed to hang in the air like a holosign above the plastic tablecloth—they weren’t going to go away. After a moment, she ventured a cautious question.

  “So your teacher didn’t play completely straight with you. Is that so bad?”

  “I trusted him,” Owen said. “To work as I did, there’s no other way besides trust. And if my work was based on lies—”

  Klea saw him flinch away from the thought. “But meant for the best, maybe,” she said, trying to offer some comfort. “If he didn’t want to see you taken by the Mages, or something.”

  She couldn’t remember ever trusting anybody enough to have the loss of faith hurt her as much as this did Owen. Not since her mother had died, anyhow. She wondered what his own family had been like. He never mentioned them except in passing, and all his shock and horror at the news from Galcen had been for the Adepts’ Guild and not for his own blood kin.

  “Maybe,” he said. “But he shouldn’t have done it, no matter what the reason. Singling out one of his students to keep safe no matter what the cost was a great wrong done to all the others. And to me.”

  He fell into a long silence. Klea watched him nervously, uncertain what to do or say. He didn’t appear to want comforting words—and she’d just about exhausted her supply of them—so it seemed the only thing she could do was wait. For quite a long time, as it turned out; she began to worry that they would get
thrown out of the shop for holding down a table too long without ordering more food. But she didn’t dare leave her seat long enough to buy anything, even if she’d had the appetite for it.

  At last, Owen blinked and came back from wherever it was he went when he put himself under that way. From the look in his eyes, she could tell at once that he had made a decision.

  “What are you going to do?” she asked. “Is there even anything you can do?”

  “Nobody stays an apprentice forever,” he said, “and I’ve been an apprentice far too long. It’s time I became an Adept.”

  “Can you?” she asked. “I mean, is it allowed?”

  He nodded. “It’s every student’s right to petition his teacher for the rank of Adept, if the student thinks the rank has been unjustly withheld.”

  “You can do that from here?” Klea asked. “Without going back to Galcen?”

  “There’s a way,” Owen said. “It’s never been used that I know of, but there is a way.”

  He didn’t sound particularly enthusiastic about the idea. Klea looked at him sharply.

  “There’s some kind of catch, isn’t there?” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “You only get to try once. And the way I’ll have to do it, going out of the body—it’s dangerous all by itself.”

  “Oh,” said Klea. She didn’t know exactly what “going out of the body” involved, but if it was serious enough to give Owen pause then she felt inclined to regard it with respect. “You’re going to try anyway, though?”

  “I have to,” he said. “I can’t work under direction any longer. I need to be free to act as I see fit.”

  Klea looked down at the tablecloth. As far as she could tell, Owen had been doing exactly that as long as she’d known him—a brief while, in the grand scheme of things, but an intense one. Of course, whatever instructions he’d thought he was working under all this time probably hadn’t said anything one way or the other about making a Guild apprentice out of the hooker downstairs.

  “Are you going to want any help?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ll need somebody to stand guard while I’m under, and some place where I can lock the door and not be bothered.”

  “I’ll watch,” Klea said at once. “But a locked door is going to be a lot harder to find.”

  She heard him sigh. “I know. But we can’t stay here.”

  “We can’t go back either,” she told him. “The whole damned apartment building’s probably got Namport Security crawling all over it by now. Or that Mage-Circle you keep talking about. Or maybe even both.”

  Klea stopped. She could feel herself having an idea—it was crawling out of the back of her mind while she watched, and she didn’t think she was going to like it.

  She was right. She didn’t like it, any more than Owen liked the thought of whatever it was he intended to do.

  I wonder, she thought as she drew a shaky breath, if this is what trying to be an Adept does to you.

  “There is one place we can go,” she said aloud. “You still have some credits on you?”

  “Yes.”

  She stood up, grabbing the day pack and the grrch-wood staff without giving herself time to hesitate. “Then come on.”

  The engineering control room of the Deathwing was no longer silent. In addition to the constant whisper of circulating air, and the low humming—more sensed than heard—of the ship’s electronics and gravity systems, anyone standing in this part of the ship could feel the steady beat of the Magebuilt vessel’s realspace engines vibrating in the deckplates like a pulse.

  To Llannat Hyfid, hearing the sounds of the vessel increase in complexity as system after system came back on line had been like listening to some immense creature coming out of stasis and into life. Of the Deathwing’s major systems, only the hyperspace engines remained inactive, and that wouldn’t last much longer.

  “We can bring the drive up for jump-testing any time now,” said E’Patu, the hull-tech warrant officer who’d been overseeing the physical end of the job. “Everything’s as ready as it’s going to get outside of a proper shipyard. Just give the word and we’ll do it.”

  He’d been addressing Lieutenant Vinhalyn, but his gaze slewed over toward Llannat as he spoke. As if it had been a signal, she felt everybody else in engineering control turning to her as well—even Vinhalyn, in the careful way he didn’t look at her at all.

  I’m not some kind of oracle, she felt like telling them, but she knew that the outburst wouldn’t do her any good. Ensign Cantrel and the rest of Ebannha’s people had regarded Llannat with a combination of awe and gratitude ever since they’d learned about her part in finding the Deathwing; and Vinhalyn had a deferential regard for Adepts that was straight out of the closing days of the last war. But she didn’t have to like it.

  If you don’t like it, inquired the voice at the back of her head, then why have you started wearing Adept’s gear all the time instead of your Space Force fatigues?

  She didn’t have an answer for that one, except that the change had felt like a necessary one, and that it still did.

  The brief, awkward pause had started stretching out long enough to be noticeable. Another breath more, and Lieutenant Vinhalyn would decide that the resident Adept didn’t have any advice for him this time, and he’d give the order to commence the jump-tests for the hyperdrive.

  “No,” she said, startling herself. “Don’t do it yet.”

  Now that she’d spoken, Vinhalyn cast a worried glance in her direction. “What’s the problem, Mistress? If there’s anything we’ve overlooked—”

  “Not that I know of,” she said. “It’s just—hold off for a little while longer, all right? I need to make one last tour of the ship first.”

  Vinhalyn looked grave. “I take it you feel that something more is needed before we power up the hyperdrive?”

  “That’s about the shape of it, yes.”

  “Then do what you have to, Mistress,” he said. “Keep us safe. Let us know when you’re ready to start the jump-tests.”

  She gave him a nod by way of reply, then grasped her staff—her short, silver-bound, Mage’s staff—in her right hand and turned to leave the engineering spaces.

  Keep them safe, she thought. Right. I still don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it. All I know is that it isn’t time yet for us to jump.

  But it seemed that she knew something more after all. The thought floated unbidden up to the surface of her mind. Because there’s something here that I haven’t found yet. When I find it, we can go.

  She closed her eyes and let her feet take her on the path she ought to follow. She walked, turned, walked and turned again, guided by her inner certainty, until she came to a spot where she no longer felt compelled to go forward. Like a cloud lifting, her compulsion and restlessness departed, to be replaced by a profound feeling of peace.

  She sighed, and opened her eyes. All at once, the stench of Magework filled her nostrils. The feel of it pressed in against her on all sides—tangled, knotty, a twisting of the substance of things, heaviest and thickest where the power should flow most cleanly. She was at the center of the ship, where no engineering or control systems ran, the dark room with the inset circle of white on its bare deck. Dim light filled the compartment. She was alone.

  I’ve been avoiding this place, she thought. Ever since I first heard Cantrel talking about it, I’ve been avoiding it, even taking other paths when the direct route lay beside this compartment. And now I’m here anyway, whether I wanted to come here or not. Because this is the place that I have to be.

  “All right,” she said aloud to the listening universe. “Here I am. What do you want?”

  And the universe answered. A sudden lethargy filled her, and she nearly collapsed with fatigue. The urge to kneel down in the center of the circle of white was near-overpowering. She struggled to fight it off.

  This is unnatural, she told herself. I should leave.

&
nbsp; But she was unable to will her feet to move.

  Klea set a fast pace on the way from the shop, walking through Namport’s darkened streets without speaking. Owen followed close behind her, also in silence; she didn’t think he was more than halfway with her, anyhow. Most of his mind was already off somewhere, making ready for whatever it was that he planned to do. She knew her way well enough that she didn’t have to slow down until she reached a moderately prosperous quarter well away from the port, and came to her destination: a brightly lit tavern, flanked on one side by a businessman’s hotel and on the other by a theater showing full-presence holovid extravaganzas.

  “Okay,” she said. “Here we are. Come on inside.”

  Owen glanced up at the tavern’s gaudy holosign—an advertisement for Tree Frog Moonlight Pale. “Here?”

  “You wanted a locked room,” she said. “If Freling’s isn’t good enough for you, then you’re on your own.”

  He looked back at her. She could see that he was uncertain, and it occurred to her that uncertainty wasn’t an expression she’d seen him wear all that often. Finally he said, “I don’t mind. But you—Klea, are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Whether I want to or not doesn’t matter,” she said impatiently. “You need a place and this is it.” Shrugging off her day pack, she thrust it and the grrch-wood staff into Owen’s hands. “Hold these for me and come on.”

  She turned away and headed for the tavern. A few seconds later she heard Owen following her. The door sensors beeped at their approach and the glass panel slid open. They passed through the antechamber and the inner doors into a climate-controlled dimness a long way from the muggy air outside.

  A large man in a loosely cut suit came up to them out of the shadows. “You’ve been away for a while.”

  “Yeah,” Klea said. “I wasn’t—” She glanced back at Owen, and lowered her voice so that only the bouncer could hear. “I wasn’t feeling too well.”

  She let her voice rise again. “This sexy guy says he feels like an all-nighter.”